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BY THE GENERAL AGREEMENT OF BOTH his champions and his detractors, Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) was American clas- sical music's first megastar, an international icon whose celebrity transcended his field. Perhaps this extraordinary popularity somehow accounts for Bernstein's long absence from the scholarly dialogues that shape official musical knowledge. Or maybe such absence has to do with the diffi- culties of placing him in relation to the categories by which musicological discourse proceeds: Was Bernstein a conductor or composer, executant or auteur? Should we understand his creative work as composer and sometime lyricist under the ru- bric of "learned" or "vernacular"? And what about his life and person: Was it Bernstein the family man, as suggested by his role as husband in a twenty-seven-year marriage and devoted fa- ther of three? Or was this mere cover for Bern- stein's "true" identity as a homosexual, a man who pursued frequent and intense relations with other men (not only in the years before and after his marriage) and who proselytized on behalf of homosexuality to all who would listen and even many who would not?
In connection with the latter relations and identity Bernstein may be understood as kindred with the myriad homosexual artists with whom he had close ties from his late teens on. These included his mentors (the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and the composer Aaron Copland), composer colleagues (Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, and David Diamond, to name just a few), and musical theater collaborators (the dancer-choreographer Jerome Robbins, playwright-novelist Arthur Laurents, and composerlyricist Stephen Sondheim). All these men were significant to Bernstein professionally as well as personally. All, in various ways, figured importantly in his life and career.
But so did his marriage and children and undoubtedly the heterosexual identity credentials that attached to them. Bernstein's longtime colleague, friend, and onetime lover Ned Rorem has written that "all homosexual conductors of the period (except Mitropoulos) . . . married," adding that "male orchestra conductors . . . were and remain married worldwide, though most of them fool around: being absolute monarchs, anything is permitted them, provided they are protected with a wedding ring."1 Unlike his earliest conducting role model, Mitropoulos, Bernstein indeed, and fatefully, bore the protection of a wedding ring - at least after 195...